'Request Programme," ion theatre's unsettling new show

Seventies-era German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz created “Request Programme” as an homage to a Bavarian radio program and news about suicides. The 65-minute hyper-realistic meditation follows Miss Rasch (Linda Libby) through her evening chores as she seemingly prepares for work the next day, and what we see is analogous to someone living in a padded room.

Set in a mundane coldwater flat (an orderly 12 ft. x 16 ft. studio with a foldout couch bed, a clue that she lives in a big city), we watch Miss Rasch in near OCD-bloom busying herself with dish washing, making a sandwich, *using the bathroom, sifting through Val-Pack coupons, tending to a pimple, using the bathroom again, washing panty hose in the sink, changing into her nightgown, using the … and sometimes falling into a blank look of silent suffering.

We’re never given an access pass to her inner monologue, nor clues into where she works, nor hints about the tragedies she’s absorbed. (A foreclosed home? Recent discovery by the feds after living on the lam 30 years?) All we hear is the TV home-shopping network Miss Rasch briefly watches, and a classical radio show -- the request programme in the title -- that she takes passing interest in (reacting to a startling musical passage or the peculiar shoutout from the DJ, played by noted retired San Diego radio announcer J.D. Steyers, “Dedicated to the lady who can’t bear too much solemnity.”).

Can the average theatergoer bear this much solemnity?

Theater is typically a grand gesture/snappy Mamet dialogue/project-to-the-cheap-seats art form – and Libby, co-founder of the San Diego Actors Alliance, has appeared in more conventional forms of theater (most recently as Miss Potter in an adaptation of Disney’s “Beauty & the Beast”). The veteran performer said she still does her vocal warmups, ironically, before each wordless show.

Director Glenn C. Paris says he loves the piece for being provocative, for stripping theater of its conventions, and, for holding to Ion Theatre’s mantra: shaking people up and getting them to think. In this case, the audience may be thinking about their own silent frustrations. This reviewer, for one, was thinking about all the “Intervention” and Dr. Phil shows highlighting the desperate amongst us, and how important it is to have a social network (even if it’s just a Facebook account).

Suffice it to say that Ion Theatre continues its reign of challenging theater in San Diego (the folks who brought us “Punks” and “The Pillowman” and continue with readings of Ibsen and soon “Streetcar Named Desire”).

*There is real plumbing on Claudio Raygoza and Matt Scott’s set. But there is no actual evacuation done onstage.